When he was 7 years old, Michael Scheeringa loved to go to Sky Harbor airport in Phoenix, Ariz., and watch the airplanes land.

“As soon as I was allowed to take the city bus by myself, I would take the bus to the airport and hang out,” he recalled recently from his office that overlooks the runway at Cuyahoga County Airport. “I had an aviation bug, and it worked out well for me.”

Mr. Scheeringa is CEO of Flight Options LLC, a private jet operator that is one of the largest in the country in the specialized field of fractional aircraft ownership.

Fractional ownership of an airplane is something like a flying timeshare. A purchaser buys a piece of a private jet and is entitled to a certain number of flying hours annually.

Mr. Scheeringa came to Flight Options in 2004 as chief operating officer and became its chief executive in January 2006. The company has 1,400 employees across the country, including 600 at the county airport in Richmond Heights.

It operates 130 aircraft, responding to the flying needs of the planes’ owners, scheduling flight crews and keeping the planes in top shape.

The job Mr. Scheeringa inherited was to turn around a struggling company.

“I had to fix the revenue side and the cost side,” he said. That meant replacing top management and modernizing the company’s fleet of aircraft.

He got his start in aviation with America West Airlines while working on his degree in transportation and logistics management at Arizona State University. He graduated from Arizona State in 1989 and stayed with America West in Phoenix until 1991, when he moved to Washington, D.C., to work for US Airways.

There, he held management positions in customer service and corporate planning, eventually becoming vice president of its US Airways Express division, a network of regional feeder airlines.

He said he left commercial aviation because “it was clear that the commercial side of the business was going to struggle; they haven’t cured their long-term problems.”

By contrast, he believes private aviation is growing and will continue to grow.

Even so, when Mr. Scheeringa first was offered the job at Flight Options, he was reluctant to accept.

“I was intrigued with the opportunity to fix the business,” he said. “But I was nervous about Cleveland.”

The concern he had for moving his wife and three young children here was short-lived, and Mr. Scheeringa since has turned into a regional cheerleader.